Otherworldly Chronicles of Covid. While Italy and the entire West they deal with the second wave of the pandemic and are struggling to contain the numbersi, there is a part of the planet where the virus is registering low numbers, countries where statistics are advancing at the rate of a few hundred or a few dozen cases per day. It is the Far East which, after adopting severe measures last spring, is now living sheltered from new emergencies. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand but also Australia and New Zealand are some of these territories spared by the coronavirus for now.
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WHO and EU data
For a long time, the data relating to China have been discussed: two days ago the Beijing authorities (according to the WHO website) had communicated a growth of just 22 cases in one day throughout the immense country and a total, from beginning of the pandemic, of 4,700 deaths. Transparency, privacy, social control in China are not understood in the same way as in Europe and from time to time doubts are raised about the data coming from that area. But other states, with legal and social models more similar to ours, still register numbers opposite to those we deal with every day in this part of the world. Japan for example (also the source of the WHO) yesterday had 699 cases, in steady decline after a peak of 2,000 in early August, and 5 deaths. There South Korea does even better: 61 new infections and no victims. Only 5 are the new patients in Thailand, where the virus according to official statistics has not been circulating since April. Identical index records theAustralia , only one sick there New Zeland. but yet the virus is circulating in Asia: India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia are grappling with a situation closer to that of Europe than that of Japan according to the data photographed this time by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (Ecdc).
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Japan: the mask as a habit
But what are the keys that have guaranteed a cordon of health to these countries? Let’s take the case of the Japan. Here the success in the fight against the coronavirus attributed primarily towidespread use among the population of the mask even before the pandemic, if only to protect themselves and others from colds and allergies. But a note available on the website of the Tokyo embassy in Italy explains even more. The fundamental insight that helped us in the fight against Covid is the notion of transmission cluster, writes Yosutoshi Nishimura, minister in charge of the fight against Covid. That is: few groups determine a very high contagiousness and therefore it is necessary to intervene on those in a surgical way, isolating them. A criterion of mapping and cross-referencing of data that involved a wide use of new technologies in front of which Japan was not caught unprepared. The Japanese health experts, the document continues, have used the “retrospective tracking” technique, reconstructing the patient’s movements long before the infection. Secondly they tried to prevent situations considered to be at highest risk: closed spaces, crowded spaces, close contacts. All this by making extensive use of information technologies and artificial intelligence. Our “new digital deal” – writes Minister Nishimura – has made work from home easier by aggressively promoting telework technology, freeing people from the need to use Tokyo’s crowded commuter trains. Finally, the technology proved to be an indispensable support for the practice of rapid salivary and antibody tests.
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Korea: tracking and big data
Digitization and use of big data are considered the key to success in the fight against coronavirus also in South Korea. Here at the beginning the situation seemed get out of hand: the epidemiology curve had been dizzying even if the cases were mainly concentrated in the large urban areas of Seoul and Daegu. Then massive population tracking policies were adopted through smartphone apps but also by resorting to trawling data collections through traces left by credit cards or video camera images in public places. A policy that has caused perplexity from a legal point of view, which was paved by a reform adopted by the Korean government in 2015 precisely to tackle the Mers epidemic, which broke out in the country at that time.
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26 October 2020 (change October 26, 2020 | 12:21)
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